Next up, Damien Austin-Walker with the his nascent thoughts on how to use what is essentially a global technology in a local way - in this case, Apple Scrumping, although as a metaphor for community involvement. Mere minutes in to the presentation the questions, ideas and suggestions come flooding - this sounding board seemed to strike a chord with most.

The primary questions were what to faciliate, how to facilitate, and also, importantly, why. On the one hand, people could be incentivised to do community work of all kinds by turning it in to some kind of actual-reality game with online rewards; but as it was pointed out, people already want to do things and facilitating that would bring immediate benefits.

Discussed topics skimmed upon touched on everything from social reputation systems to QR codes, RFID and GPS. In many ways discussion overlapped the previous presentation I was in.
Clearly this is an area full of questions without any real answers. Many good ideas flowed around the room but nobody is really doing any of this stuff yet, and nobody can really say what works and what won’t. The major hurdles seem to be the dual barriers of technology uptake and public understanding and acceptance; right now it seems like this sort of facilitated community work would require a lot of geeks in a small space - a bit like this conference.

The topic title had me curious, so let’s see what happens! Fresh from the talk on how to write good headlines (according to The Times Online), perhaps this would better have been entitled ‘Native to a Web of Britney Spears on Viagra’ - who can say.

David Thompson hails from Cambridge. A self professed geek, he draws on material from talks by Tom Coates, Ben Ward and Tantek Celik to give a presentation on microformats. The first half of his presentation seems to covering familiar ground, although I’m grateful for the list of names and terms to take notes from.

Immediately interesting to me was the informtion about Yahoo Fireeagle, which I had not previously heard of - think geo-location mashup, and if you can’t, ask… Another interesting point was that microformats don’t take off until they are adopted (Kelkoo, Flickr).
‘Ambient Intimacy’ seemed to be the hot topic, prompting immediate discussion and questions from the group. DO we really care if a friend wants to tell us they are eating a burger right now somewhere in the world? I didn’t find an answer to that. Indeed, there are many interesting deeper unresolved issues in this area, too many for this blog post.

XFN gives us one means to avoid David’s pet hate - that when you join a new social network (assuming you haven’t succumbed to Social Network Fatigue, the ‘CBF’ of the 21st century), to find your friends, they often ask you for your email or messenger password so they can log in and find them… a cardinal sin and a huge security risk. Other means are available too - Facebook and Twitter’s publicly exposed friends or follower lists. Directly using these would be ‘creepy’ - what’s the One True road?

In reality, XFN - or the idea of XFN - gives us a means to follow everything we are interested in, as long as it has an RSS feed, or perhaps a VCard or HCard. David mentioned FriendFeed and a tool written by my colleague David Singleton as a good start to an implementation - I resisted the urge to jump up with pride.
What I really took home from this presentation was that information does not always speak for itself. David Thompson’s bold uneasiness at public speaking was eventually endearing, but I think he could have kept the attention of the non-techy person who left the room (’I'm sorry, it’s not you, it’s IT!’) had he re-ordered some of his points for catchiness instead of putting them in dependency order like every good programmer is used to.

Overall: thought provoking and informative.

First talk of the day from a fresh-faced looking Martin of Communote, Germany, demonstrating his new microblogging service. Nervous - his first barcamp event (incidentally, my first one too) - his presentation is slick and certainly no impromptu grass-roots affair.

Martin’s primary points are very valid: Twitter is not the be all and end all of microblogging. He refers to Twitter as ‘micromessaging’ - something i’m not 100% sure that I agree with, but name is not as important as the distinction. Twitter lacks some of the features of a blog that Martin sees as essential, specifically tagging and filtering, as well as other things that could be fixed such as the security of archival and visibility. Martin sees tag subscription in microblogging as something that could be very useful in the enterprise, although I would love to see this generally.

Communote seems very topic-centric, which is a great feature for business. But in my eyes, blogging is as much about personality as it is about subject matter - so I’ll be sticking with Twitter for now, although with a slightly more focussed perspective.

Thanks to everyone who showed their support at Xpression Sessions @ Bar Vinyl in Camden last night, hosted by myself and DJ Dymond (BBC 1Xtra/Knowhow Records)! Here’s Tuesday’s Bassdrive.com show!

Tracklist (incomplete because I’m doing this from memory:)

1. ???
2. Calibre - Try
3. ???
4. Dune -Robot Rock
5. Camo & Krooked - ???
6. ???
7. Markoman & Tsunami - Paranoia
8. Shock One - ???
9. The Ego & DJ Roots feat. Ill-Esha - Hypnotize
10. Spinlock & Jayji - You
11. ???
12. Subfocus - Druggy
13. Subsonik - Remember VIP
14. ???
15. ???
16. Raiden & Temper D - False Alarm
17. Pacific - ???
18. Undergang - Silence Des Soumis (Metrik Remix)
19. Silent Witness & Break - ???
20. ???
21. Sparfunk - Tonight
22. Bad Company - Brainscan
23. Photek - The Beginning
24. Common - The Light (bootleg)
25. Jonny L feat. Optical - Viper
26. Break - ???
27. Bulletproof - ???
28. Absolute Zero & Subphonics - The Code (Tactile Remix)
29. Logistics - Cold World
30. The Ego & DJ Roots feat. Ill-Esha - Universe
31. Telemetrik - Cosmos
32. Logistics - Spotlight
33. Syncopix - Dos Or Die
34. Kiro & Subsonik - What We Were Born To Do
35. Noisia - Façade VIP
36. Ant Miles - ???
37. Kiko - Octane
38. Fierce, Silent Witness and Nico - Galleon
39. Subsonik - Tanker
40. The Qemists - ???
41. The Upbeats - ???
42. SST vs Glitch - Intake Remix
43. Poise - Worth Living
44. The Ego & DJ Roots feat. Bungle - Conquest System
45. Logistics - Missing Link VIP
46. Girl Gone - Soul Shaker
47. Shock One - Droppin’ This
48. Noisia - Concussion
49. Castor feat. Ill-Esha - Not The Way
50. Subsonik - Frozen Remix
Attempt to fill in the gaps IF YOU DARE!

Launched yesteday! Thanks for Chris Blu Mar Ten and Terpsichore for their outstanding collaborations!

www.loldjs.com

And many more ;D

Download the latest XPOSURE show here! Plenty to keep you entertained…

Includes tracks from Groove Armada, Ill-Esha, Photek, The Qemists, Spor, Baron, Noisia, Break, Lomax and others.

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Check out http://www.resident.at/, the official website for Resident Magazine. Massive shouts to Intoxicated Vie and all of the Resident crew.

Of course, it’s only worth reading if you speak German… otherwise you’ll be limited to looking at the pictures.

I recently added a couple of pages to my site with some free software for you to download.

The first is a plugin for WordPress called Sandbox Relocator which makes working in a sandbox or staged environment easier. No more hacking the database each time you sync your test copy with the live version.

The second is a plugin for Pidgin called Always Accept which lets you receive files auto-accept style from anyone, like how the official AIM client and Trillian do it, not just from people who are on your buddy list that you’ve approved, which is how the Pidgin bundled Auto Accept plugin does it.

Thank me later…

Two things[*] annoy me about MySpace:

1. You can’t search your inbox.

2. When someone deletes their account, it deletes every message they sent you, including ones you saved.

Well, I did something about it. I wrote a program to read my inbox and mail me all of the contents!

Click here for a screen shot.

[*] a lot more than 2 things annoy me about myspace, but 2 things in specific, ok?

Back to back set with my house mate Paul (Inside Info) - yes, the same one who’s been featured on 1Xtra and signed to Terrafunk / Ganjatek. Check out the music, and don’t mind the flying teabags.

Right click, save as (165Mb)